Oxytocin for Autism?

I'm relatively new to peptides and hormones. My main focus are on the fundamentals of health. However, in the last year I addressed the question about hormone deficiencies. Practitioners knowledgeable in this field all agree that chemicals and, specifically, endocrine disruptors, can adversely impact hormones and their balance even in the most health.

Today Dr. Hasalas, a very knowledgeable doctor wrote to me saying the following (dosing omitted because this is NOT a medical consult!)

Are you administering ... intranasal progesterone and ... of oxytocin to your patients over 50?

This combination is considered highly effective for anti-aging. It offers benefits for:

Alleviating both central and peripheral pain
Providing protective effects against cancers such as prostate and breast cancer
Managing prostate-related conditions
Treating insomnia
Regulating conditions dominated by estrone and cortisone
Reducing high blood pressure
Assisting in weight management

My special prescriber suggested I get some OXT, as it is often referred to, and I recently started taking it - mainly because most of my sex hormones are low.

A substantial body of literature suggests that OXT has beneficial effects on brain function, particularly mood, empathy and anxiety. There is also consideration of its use in Autism. Could there be a connection between Autism, vaccines, and the delivery of endocrine disruptors?

Pardon me if this is well known. However, I am attending MedMaps next week and nothing on OXT came up when searching their site.

The MAPS people ARE aware of OXT. Here is a quote from one of their founders.

"Hands down (oxytocin is) one of the best interventions from my maps dr prescribed a little over 10 years ago… used for social cognition improvement!

Has to be nasal from the right pharmacy."

Here is the first paper I read on this topic, published in 1998.

https://www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S0006-3223(97)00439-3/pdf

Background: Social impairments are central to the syndrome of autism. The neuropeptide oxytocin (OT) has been implicated in the regulation of social behavior in animals but has not yet been examined in autistic subjects.

Methods: To determine whether autistic children have abnormalities in OT, midday plasma samples from 29 autistic and 30 age-matched normal children, all prepubertal, were analyzed by radioimmunoassay for levels of OT.

Results: Despite individual variability and overlapping group distributions, the autistic group had significantly lower plasma OT levels than the normal group.

OT increased with age in the normal but not the autistic children.

Elevated OT was associated with higher scores on social and developmental measures for the normal children, but was associated with lower scores for the autistic children. (Lewis - ???? Hmmm)

These relationships were strongest in a subset of autistic children identified as aloof.

Conclusions: Although inferring central OT functioning from peripheral measurements is difficult, the data suggest that OT abnormalities may exist in autism and that more direct investigation of central nervous system OT function is warranted.

A search of the medical literature shows that first paper on the relationship between OXT and autism was published in the early 1990s (at least when searching titles)

A deeper search (yes, I still rely on google for medical searches, at least using specific keywords - what choice do I have? ugh).

541 articles discuss the relationship between Autism and oxytocin - as determined by a title-only search. That means there are substantially more such articles.